A Matter of Taste

Chapter 7

The digging, and the nightingale's song, went on above my head. Presently, as I continued to struggle my way toward full consciousness, I could hear with great distinctness the harsh scraping of some iron tool, a shovel doubtless, upon the wooden barrier only a handbreadth above my face. A dusting of powdery earth, along with a few small insects, came sifting down through the cracks between boards. Already, after no more than a mere two years or so in the grave, my coffin was beginning to shrink and warp and fall asunder, even if I was not.

Having reached that stage of vampirish revival in which the mind begins to be competently active, even though the body as yet remains all but completely paralyzed, I considered drawing in a lungful of dusty air and frightening away the intruder with a bellow. Now I could tell that but a single person labored to unearth me. I decided to make no noise. A face-to-face welcome would be more appropriate.

The digging stopped, eventually, to be replaced by a futile tugging, directed first at the head of my container, then the foot. I could hear the intruder gasping with the effort, but neither end could be lifted very far. Evidently to drag my coffin up out of the shallow pit that had once been a secret grave was going to be beyond the lone invader's strength. Instead, there came a new tool-noise. My coffin lid was going to be pried off.

Being already somewhat warped and rotted, as I have mentioned, it came loose readily enough, but only one plank at a time.

Suddenly there was moonlight on my face, reflected and unpainful sunlight in my eyes, enough to make a bright halo of the digger's hair.

I could see at once that my uninvited guest was a woman, young and lithe. Strong, from the way she handled her tools, though not very large; and I could tell by her clothing, garbed as she was in the traditional dress of her people, that she was a gypsy. Bright earrings, forged I am sure of real silver, drew sparks from the moon.

By now I had regained the power of movement. But for the time being I chose to remain still and silent.

Unexpectedly she spoke. "And there you are, my handsome moroi! As I thought, a power of magic here. More than a year beneath the sod, and your flesh still uncorrupted." The right hand of the gypsy, who was hardly more than a girl, prodded an exposed bicep with a sharp fingernail and then moved on. "And here is a nice dagger. Well, that will be of some use." But the reaching hand made no move to extract the weapon from my coffin yet.

Still I did not move. My eyes were open, but I held them still and dull as those of a corpse; it is a thing that we can do.

The young woman crouched with clasped hands beside my coffin, speaking to me at greater length, almost but not quite as if she thought I could hear her. The tenor of her speech was rejoicing that her surmise had proven correct and that she found my body still uncorrupted.

Next she untied a small cloth bundle she had brought with her and began to go through various magical rituals, blowing foul powder in my face and chanting stupid spells. All totally useless, as most such efforts are. As I surmised at the time and later was able to confirm, they constituted an effort to keep me quiet while she hacked off various parts of my anatomy. I waited, joyfully anticipating what was going to happen when I finally moved, and waiting to see if my visitor had any more preliminaries in mind before she began to use her knife.

But there were no more. When the despoiler of my grave raised my right arm, took firm hold of the forefinger, and drew her own small dagger, I judged that the time had come to act.

I had long since left behind me many of the common susceptibilities of breathing flesh, and my assailant would have faced a most difficult task in trying to hack me to pieces with any implement of metal. But I did not allow her to make the attempt. As she held up my arm, tugging hard against a certain inherent stiffness—more appropriate to a day-old than a year-old corpse—I suddenly returned her handclasp. My own grasp was gentle, but still sufficiently firm to insure that the digit she was attempting to isolate should not be left undefended.

The young woman's first reaction was disappointingly restrained; she only gasped, and would have pulled away, but my grip was vastly too strong to allow that. Courageous as she was, I think that in the next moment she might have fainted. But now I had shifted the direction of my gaze, and with my eyes locked on hers I willed her to retain consciousness.

Her next move was a wise one, to throw down the knife she had been holding in her free hand. Then she began to mutter, and presently declaimed aloud, first prayers and then more abominations of witchcraft.

I spoke to her for the first time. "I command you, girl, cease this shameful, wicked way of speaking. If you are going to pray, pray properly!"

Her response surprised me: "And who are you, moroi, to call me wicked? Or to give me instructions in prayer?" And she tossed her head in a gesture of defiance.

She had again used the term for undead, and for some reason that gave me pause. Despite all my recent experience I had never yet thought of myself in such a way. "Well," I said at last. "I am undead indeed. But when you come right down to it, what does that mean, except that I am, thanks to the good God, still alive?"

My captive uttered a little yelp of shock and astonishment, an almost endearing sound. "You dare to speak the good Lord's name? Hell strike you down!"

Again it was my turn to be surprised. "Indeed? And why should He do that?"

She was shivering, though the night was not that cold, and seemed unable to answer. "I am Vlad Drakulya," I told her after a pause. "Once Prince of Wallachia. But I suppose you knew that, woman. If not, whose grave did you think you were violating? And what is your name?"

"I am called Constantia." She was shivering more and more with fear by this time, though somehow managing to keep her voice almost under control. Courage has always fascinated and impressed me.

I squeezed her hand—still almost gently. "And on what task, good Constantia, were you about to employ your dagger? Did you think my fingernails might be in need of trimming, after so long in the grave? Is that what brought you here tonight?"

She stared at me, and then produced a tremulous little smile. If my grip was causing her pain she gave no sign. Her spoken answers remained evasive. But of course I understood perfectly well that what must have brought her to my grave was the practice of witchcraft—doubtless she had meant to excise more than one portion of my anatomy to aid her in her spells. Dead men's eyes, fingers, testicles—the witch's shopping list is long—were and are considered of great value. Most in demand are the parts of executed criminals, followed by those of men of spiritual power. Looking back, I can believe that I was considered as belonging to both categories.

How, by what means of bribery or divination, this little apprentice witch had learned the location of my grave I was never to discover. She must have assumed that the body of Prince Drakulya would possess some special efficacy to aid her in her work. But as the situation actually worked out, she was, I believe, content to leave my bones intact, forgetting her original purpose in the dazzling light of her discovery that I was not dead after all. Yes, I know she had expected to find an undead, or thought she had; but to actually observe the fact was something else. Gypsy witches of the time, and Constantia in particular, were not known for the fine precision of their logic.

"Why do you call me moroi?" I asked her more than once on that first night as I helped her to fill in my grave above the empty coffin. Of course I knew what the name meant, but to me it was no more than a superstitious word applied by foolish peasants to some of their more unsettling nightmares.

Sometimes, when I asked her this, she must have thought that I was angry, for in answer she would only shake her head and maintain silence. On other occasions, a few minutes earlier or later, she must have considered me to be in a good mood, for she tried to argue that I did indeed fit that category. Not that she had ever known anyone else who was moroi.

Our acquaintance prospered from the start, though for some weeks after our first encounter I refrained from sleeping in my proper grave, half expecting that Constantia might come back when I was deep in one of my stupors and renew her efforts to carve me up.

But now to return to those first minutes of her first visit to my grave. Letting go her hand at last, and then clasping her with both arms around the waist, I stepped up out ofmy newly reexcavated pit, lifting her with me. Her strength was, of course, no match for mine. But no sooner had we demonstrated this than our struggle, that had begun as a tentative combat, began to assume quite other aspects.

Sex, for a vampire, is almost inextricably confused with taking nourishment, and both of course involve almost exclusively the drinking of the blood.

Whatever expectations of sensual delight might have been aroused in either Constantia or myself on our first night together were more than fully realized, though not in the way that I, at least, until the moment of our embrace, had expected.

In my transformed mode of existence, the blood is indeed the life. It is everything, the single physical craving and the single physical requirement. Before embracing my passionate little witch I had scarcely begun to understand that fact; but before our first coupling was concluded, both of us were very firmly convinced.

Ah, Constantia, the first love of my second life! Surely your maidenhood, in the breathing, mundane sense, had been lost long before that night; but on that night you were still as virginal as I was myself in the delights of vampirism. Constantia, where are you now?

In that infancy, dawn-time, childhood of my second life, other women, of course, soon began to appear. Folk who consider that keeping score in such matters is of great importance might say that there were a great many such women, of diverse social classes. My new sensuality having been awakened, I began actively, on subsequent evenings, to seek them out. Yet during the months following my introduction to the little gypsy, with maddening effect upon all my plans both serious and erotic, the great bulk of my time was consumed, wasted, in those lengthy periods when I could only lie stuporous in the earth.

Slowly, very slowly, as those first months of my reborn and transformed sexuality stretched imperceptibly into years, I accustomed myself to the joys and difficulties, peculiar powers and strange limitations of my new existence. With regular feeding, upon both animal and human blood, the wounds that had sent me to my grave healed entirely, even the visible scars disappearing in good time. Mine could have been a heartily enjoyable existence, all in all. But I was prevented from making any philosophical evaluation of my condition, as much by my obsessive craving for revenge as by the lethargy that tended to set in whenever the blood-craving had been temporarily sated.

My two surviving enemies, Basarab and Bogdan, for whom my hatred was as fresh and deep as ever, were seldom absent from my thoughts. But they were not to be found anywhere in the nearby countryside—someone had told me they were gone to Bucharest. It was obvious that if I was ever to come within reach of them, I must find a way of breaking free of my dusk-to-dawn existence, that constrained me to remain always within a few hours' travel of my grave. I seemed to remember, from talk I had overheard on the night of my burial, that there had been a plan to move me to another grave, in a hidden spot under one of my castles. But for whatever reason, no one ever appeared to try to put such a scheme into effect.

Constantia and I continued for a time to see each other frequently. Slowly, gradually, as I say, I grew accustomed to my new mode of existence. Up until this time—despite all the talk of moroi in the countryside—I had had no contact at all with other vampires, knew no master of this mode of life to guide me through my apprenticeship, no local community of my race to bid me welcome. Still, as my first affair with the young would-be witch had demonstrated, the state of being which I had now entered was not entirely unknown to the local populace. And I began to understand more fully, from one after another of the young women who became my lovers, how my condition was regarded by their people and the various names by which they thought it should be called. Then, I thought, there must have been others like me, in the past. Where were they now?

The superstitious awe in which I was held was sometimes amusing, sometimes useful, sometimes maddening. I do believe that every single one of my lovers, during that distant epoch, were certain that I must be somehow in alliance with the Evil One; and more than one of them earnestly sought my help in establishing such a connection for herself, as if no greater boon could be imagined.

It was with great difficulty that I convinced these girls and women that they misjudged me, and perhaps the Evil One as well. No doubt one or more of them managed somehow to achieve her wicked aim, without my help. As for my own alleged dealings with the devil, I had long ago taken solemn oaths of fealty to his great Opponent; and for a Drakulya such pledges are not to be set aside.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the stubborn convictions of my breathing acquaintances regarding my spiritual condition, I became ever more firmly convinced that what had happened to me had no connection with the supernatural. Thanks to my own supremely stubborn will—and to the permissive will, at least, of God—the death by sword cuts that I had undergone was no true death. My abode was neither heaven nor hell nor purgatory. Rather it was the grave I slept in daily, my body capable of passing up out of it and back again like so much smoke during the hours of darkness. And this, my earthen sanctuary, was dug out of nothing more or less than the soil of my homeland, in which I had been born.

My lovers were not the only ones who observed me during this period. Certain other peasants of the region accidentally caught glimpses of my mysterious form, near dawn or dusk, and mostly at a distance. These were beginning to whisper that I still lived, or at any rate still walked. So began my local reputation as a revenant, which was to grow gradually over the centuries.

But what the bulk of the population might know about me, or what superstitious nonsense they might imagine, concerned me little, particularly in the first year or two after my conversion. Very little had meaning for me beyond my own affairs. The women who were my lovers, and one or two other peasants who became my loyal if somewhat demented servants—who but a madman would have served a vampire then?—were always bringing me more news than I cared to hear concerning current events.

I listened, more than once, to the story of how my half-brother Radu, called the Handsome, had been confirmed as Prince of Wallachia in my stead. And I heard what I thought was reliable confirmation of what had happened to other members of my family. I was perfectly certain that the only ones I cared about were dead.

What might be the current state of the realm that I had ruled, and exactly what had befallen the few human beings that I loved—these questions seemed hardly relevant to me then. The monolithic concentration of willpower necessary to achieve what I had achieved in the way of exceptional survival, and the rage for revenge that was its corollary, had left me almost unable to think of anything else. My attempt to revenge myself upon Ronay had been essentially a failure, despite the fact that he was dead. He might very well have died anyway, of his infected wound. Perhaps all I had accomplished on my invasion of the monastery was to hasten his end and lessen his suffering.

During this period I was myself quite mad by ordinary standards—of course observers were not lacking who would have pronounced me thoroughly insane long before the day on which I fell with fatal sword wounds. But now, in the midst of a slow mental and physical recovery, the fever of combat was still on me, the heat of that brief savage struggle in which my flesh had died and been reborn. My sense of time, along with much else, was still awry.

The only news reports to which I paid the least attention were those concerning the two surviving scoundrels of the three who had struck me down. Well before I was able to exercise sufficient control over my new powers and limitations to have a chance of going after them, I heard to my dismay that they had both departed for Italy, there to hire out as mercenaries.

Perhaps, I thought, the traitors had experienced some difficulty in collecting their blood-price from the Sultan and had failed to establish themselves in positions of power at home. Whatever their reasons, a sojourn in Italy was a common enough interlude in the careers of European soldiers of the time. Indeed, I had once visited that chronically troubled land myself, on a secret mission for the King of Hungary.

The news of my enemies' departure hit me hard, and of course there was no question in my mind that I must contrive some way to follow them. But if their townhouses in Bucharest had been too far away for me to reach, in my present state of dependence on my grave, how in the name of Heaven was I ever going to lay my hands on them beyond the Alps?

I need not dwell on my first abortive attempts to extend my effective radius of travel. I soon found that I could rest without reentering my actual grave at every dawn. Any dark, secluded spot, where I could lie in contact with the earth, would do. But having passed the border of my homeland, it became necessary for me to turn back each night as dawn approached. I was unable to obtain my necessary daytime rest in any soil but that of my native country.

Forcing my unabated frenzy for revenge to yield to cold calculation, I took thought on the matter. At first the restriction, like several others to which I now was subject, seemed absurd. If by my iron will I had been able to fight off death itself, then why should I not, by a lesser effort, overcome this seeming triviality of dependence on my home earth? Absurd or not, that was how the matter stood, and so it would remain. How very human, I think now, what excellent proof of the vampire's persistent humanity: Our race can accomplish prodigies, but stumbles nonetheless on many matters that seem small.

There was no way around the obstacle, except in patience and solid, persistent planning. Some fragments of ancient lore, twisted in the telling and retelling, yet gave me the hint I needed: Travel anywhere was indeed possible for the vampire, provided only that he or she carried along, or shipped ahead, some earth of the true homeland on which to sleep. What can the soil, much less the soul, comprehend of the boundaries of politics? Yet so the situation was, and so it still remains.

To help me I recruited a small handful of such breathing followers as I could muster. Not only insanity but dimwittedness was epidemic among them, I fear, and some were continually disappointed that I would have no commerce with the devil. Such tools as I could find, I used as best I could. Still, years passed before I could arrange for systematic shipments of Wallachian earth to Italy, and for my dirt's concealment there in certain carefully chosen places. And my long sleeps, some lasting many months, in my grave or near it, continued also. Years more were wasted—as I then thought—in helpless stupor.

During my periods of wakefulness, word reached me again and again, at discouragingly long intervals, that the two men I sought were still alive, and still in Italy, where they appeared to have found the finest arena on earth in which to display and profit by their skills of treachery and violence. Bogdan in particular had grown eminently successful in his new profession of condottiere, and I felt confident of being able to locate him, at least, with little difficulty.

Such an undertaking as that of my international earth shipments, carried out with a maximum of secrecy, would be far from trivial in any time, including this modern era in which I write. Take my word for it that in the late fifteenth century, with the multitude of political and economic uncertainties obtaining then, the problems were truly formidable.

Yet I persevered, and refused to be hurried. Many military campaigns had taught me the importance of proper preparation. Despite my unabated lust for vengeance, and the risk of having my adversaries escape, I would not move until I was ready. Decades had passed since the traitors cut me down, and the last years of the century were at hand before I felt ready and able to proceed.